The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.
-Mark Weiser, 1991 “The Computer for the 21st Century” Scientific American
The goal is to achieve the most effective kind of technology, that which is essentially invisible to the user… I call this future world “Ubiquitous Computing” (Ubicomp).
-Mark Weiser, 1993 “Some Computer Science issues in Ubiquitous Computing” Communications of the ACM
2009 marks the tenth anniversary of the death of a man that many believe earned the title ‘visionary’, his name was Mark Weiser. As a Principal Scientist and subsequently Chief Technology Officer at Xerox PARC, Weiser is best known as the ‘godfather’ of ubiquitous computing. In the years since his demise many of the ideas that Weiser championed have come to greater prominence. As Yvonne Rogers points out this influence has been felt across industry, government and commercial research, from the EU’s ‘disappearing computer’ initiative to MIT’s ‘Oxygen’, HP’s ‘CoolTown’ and Phillips ‘Vision of the Future’. All of these projects aspired to Weiser’s tenet of the everyday environment and the objects within being embeded with computational capacities such that they might bend to our (human) will. Within the research community, as Bell and Dourish remark, ‘of the 108 papers comprising the Ubicomp conference proceedings between 2001 and 2004, fully 47% of the papers are oriented towards a proximate (and inevitable) technological future’ and ‘almost one quarter of all the papers published in the Ubicomp conference between 2001 and 2005 cite Weiser’s foundational articles’.
